This book explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with theexemplatradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative andexemplumin the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the...

Fictions of Witness in the Confessio Amantisdetails the first years of the Confessio’s material history and offers a major revision to a century’s old narrative of political revision and conversion around the trauma of 1400. Joel Fredell argues for “late stage” revisions by Gower to his great poem in Middle English from the late 1390s up to Gower’s death in 1408. This approach, new to scholarship for Ricardian and Lancastrian literature, demands profound re-evaluation of Gower's poetic persona and its entanglement in the opening and closing books of theConfessio. It offers a...

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19brings a holistic and comparative perspective to “plague writing” from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human “hardware” has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human “software” (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut,...

Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval Englandoffers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the intersection of the natural and the supernatural and its site can be located inside the human body’s unstable physical frame, living and dead, as much as in the cultural and social forces at work upon the human body politic at large. Hybridity is unlike other constructs of difference in that, while it is grounded in difference, hybridity points...